Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

In September 2016, the influential blogger and commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote a 7,000-word essay for New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.” Its subtitle was alarming: “An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.”

A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion. It’s not that any one app or website was particularly bad when considered in isolation. As many people clarified, the issue was the overall impact of having so many different shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood.

Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

some of these addictive properties are accidental (few predicted the extent to which text messaging could command your attention), while many are quite purposeful (compulsive use is the foundation for many social media business plans).

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention.

they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.

the negative impact of unrestricted online activity on psychological well-being. Many people I spoke to underscored social media’s ability to manipulate their mood.

online discussion seems to accelerate people’s shift toward emotionally charged and draining extremes.

In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity.

our culture’s relationship with these tools is complicated by the fact that they mix harm with benefits.

people are tired of feeling like they’ve become a slave to their devices.

I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

Neo-Luddites, who advocate the abandonment of most new technologies.

Quantified Self enthusiasts, who carefully integrate digital devices into all aspects of their life with the goal of optimizing their existence. Of the different philosophies I studied, however, there was one in particular that stood out as a superior answer for those looking to thrive in our current moment of technological overload. I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

Long before Henry David Thoreau exclaimed “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do ...

ruthlessly reducing their time spent online to focus on a small number of high-value activities. Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens. The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology.

Part 1 concludes by introducing my suggested method for adopting this philosophy: the digital declutter

This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction.

At the end of the thirty days, you will then add back a small number of carefully chosen online activities that you believe will provide massive benefit to these things you value. Going forward, you’ll do your best to make these intentional activities the core of your online life—leaving behind most of the other distracting behaviors that used to fragment your time and snare your attention.

the importance of solitude and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now dedicate to mindless device use.

I also provide an insider look at the attention resistance—a loosely organized movement of individuals who use high-tech tools and strict operating procedures to extract value from the products of the digital attention economy, while avoiding falling victim to compulsive use.

we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel.

a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.

In our current moment, smartphones have reshaped people’s experience of the world by providing an always-present connection to a humming matrix of chatter and distraction. In January 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone during his famous Macworld keynote, the vision was much less grandiose.

“The killer app is making calls,” Jobs exclaimed to applause during his keynote. It’s not until thirty-three minutes into that famed presentation that he gets around to highlighting features like improved text messaging and mobile internet access that dominate the way we now use these devices. To confirm that this limited vision was not some quirk of Jobs’s keynote script, I spoke with Andy Grignon, who was one of the original iPhone team members. “This was supposed to be an iPod that made phone calls,” he confirmed. “Our core mission was playing music and making phone calls.” As Grignon then explained to me, Steve Jobs was initially dismissive of the idea that the iPhone would become more of a general-purpose mobile computer running a variety of different third-party applications.

When the iPhone first shipped in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notifications, no quick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance down a dozen times during a dinner—and this was absolutely fine with Steve Jobs, and the millions who bought their first smartphone during this period.

that the average modern user would spend around two hours per day on social media and related messaging services, with close to half that time dedicated to Facebook’s products alone. Similarly, a first adopter who picked up an iPhone in 2007 for the music features would be less enthusiastic if told that within a decade he could expect to compulsively check the device eighty-five times a day—a “feature” we now know Steve Jobs never considered as he prepared his famous keynote.

We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life.

The source of our unease is not evident in these thin-sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.

It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.

many of these new tools are not nearly as innocent as they might first seem. People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.

As I’ll argue next, it’s probably more accurate to say that we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone. “How is that a slot machine?” Cooper asks. “Well, every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see ‘What did I get?’” Harris answers. “There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used [by technology companies] to get you using the product for as long as possible.” “Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?” Cooper asks. “They are programming people,” Harris says. “There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—” “Technology is not neutral?” Cooper interrupts. “It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”

After playing a clip of the Harris interview for his HBO audience, Maher quips: “Where have I heard this before?” He then cuts to Mike Wallace’s famous 1995 interview with Jeffrey Wigand—the whistleblower who confirmed for the world what most already suspected: that the big tobacco companies engineered cigarettes to be more addictive. “Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.”

After a mind-opening experience at Burning Man, Harris, in a move straight out of a Cameron Crowe screenplay, wrote a 144-slide manifesto titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.”

The primary source of friction, of course, is almost certainly more simple: Minimizing distraction and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue. Compulsive use sells, which Harris now acknowledges when he claims that the attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”

His first book, Drunk Tank Pink, cataloged numerous similar cases where seemingly small environmental factors create large changes in behavior.

Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. Until recently, it was assumed that addiction only applied to alcohol or drugs: substances that include psychoactive compounds that can directly change your brain chemistry. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, however, a mounting body of research suggested that behaviors that did not involve ingesting substances could become addictive in the technical sense defined above. An important 2010 survey paper, for example, appearing in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, concluded that “growing evidence suggests that behavioral addictions resemble substance addictions in many domains.” The article points to pathological gambling and internet addiction as two particularly well-established examples of these disorders. When the American Psychiatric Association published its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013, it included, for the first time, behavioral addiction as a diagnosable problem.

As Alter admits, the behavioral addictions connected to technology tend to be “moderate” as compared to the strong chemical dependencies created by drugs and cigarettes.

in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

In his 2017 book, Irresistible, which details his study of this topic, Alter explores the many different “ingredients” that make a given technology likely to hook our brain and cultivate unhealthy use.

repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. Our brains are highly susceptible to these forces. This matters because many of the apps and sites that keep people compulsively checking their smartphones and opening browser tabs often leverage these hooks to make themselves nearly impossible to resist.

Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving. The original Zeiler experiment had pigeons pecking a button that unpredictably released a food pellet. As Adam Alter points out, this same basic behavior is replicated in the feedback buttons that have accompanied most social media posts since Facebook introduced the “Like” icon in 2009. “It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use,” Alter writes.

Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates what one Facebook engineer calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” while the latter feels bad. Either way, the outcome is hard to predict, which, as the psychology of addiction teaches us, makes the whole activity of posting and checking maddeningly appealing.

Many people have the experience of visiting a content website for a specific purpose—say, for example, going to a newspaper site to check the weather forecast—and then find themselves thirty minutes later still mindlessly following trails of links, skipping from one headline to another. This behavior can also be sparked by unpredictable feedback: most articles end up duds, but occasionally you’ll land on one that creates a strong emotion, be it righteous anger or laughter. Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle. Technology companies, of course, recognize the power of this unpredictable positive feedback hook and tweak their products with it in mind to make their appeal even stronger. As whistleblower Tristan Harris explains: “Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business.”

As Harris notes, the notification symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, “but no one used it.” So they changed the color to red—an alarm color—and clicking skyrocketed.

in the fall of 2017, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, spoke candidly at an event about the attention engineering deployed by his former company: The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.

When justifying Facebook use, for example, many will point to something like the ability to find out when a friend’s new baby is born, which is a one-way transfer of information that does not require feedback (it’s implied that people “like” this news). In other words, there’s nothing fundamental about the unpredictable feedback that dominates most social media services. If you took these features away, you probably wouldn’t diminish the value most people derive from them. The reason this specific dynamic is so universal is because it works really well for keeping eyes glued to screens.

If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave.* The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this “vital” information. The power of this drive for social approval should not be underestimated. Leah Pearlman, who was a product manager on the team that developed the “Like” button for Facebook (she was the author of the blog post announcing the feature in 2009), has become so wary of the havoc it causes that now, as a small business owner, she hires a social media manager to handle her Facebook account so she can avoid exposure to the service’s manipulation of the human social drive.

A similar drive to regulate social approval helps explain the current obsession among teenagers to maintain Snapchat “streaks” with their friends, as a long unbroken streak of daily communication is a satisfying confirmation that the relationship is strong. It also explains the universal urge to immediately answer an incoming text, even in the most inappropriate or dangerous conditions (think: behind the wheel). Our Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention by the communal fire: a potentially dangerous social faux pas.